How to reduce the environmental footprint of your business

Sustainability is a growing requirement from governments, suppliers and customers. Here’s how you can start making your facilities more sustainable and reduce your environmental footprint.

It can hardly come as a surprise that global warming will be one of the main sustainability challenges for the coming century. As a response, public institutions and governments create regulations to cut carbon emissions and stimulate business towards higher sustainability efficiency. The ones, who manage to use their resources effectively will gain an advantage. Contrary, businesses with inefficient operations that emit the most carbon, use the most water, consume the most electric power and value short term monetary gains over brand reputation will increasingly face difficulties - very costly difficulties.

Green is competitive

Sustainability presents a number of opportunities for core organizations and facility management providers to improve brand reputation and the overall competitiveness of the business. Overall, companies and their facility management providers that invest in sustainable technologies will have an advantage. These companies will be able to offer their customers ways to reduce their impact on the environment, save resources and reduce costs. Reducing costs and improving efficiency is not the only benefit of minimizing the environmental footprint. For many organizations, the sustainable workplace will be a tool to attract talents who are becoming more focused on their values and wish to contribute to the world.

Where to start?

To gain success, companies need to think sustainability into their overall processes. Current approaches to sustainability are predominantly focused on the physical confines of the building.

In high-income markets, the focus is on retrofitting. Green retrofits are any kind of upgrade to an existing building that is wholly or partially occupied to improve energy and environmental performance, reduce water use, and improve the comfort and quality of the space in terms of natural light, air quality, and noise - all done in a way that is financially beneficial to the owner.

Many businesses still don't recognize that working sustainably also means working cost-effectively. To turn this around requires a willingness to buck conventional financial wisdom by focusing not on reducing the cost of each part but on increasing the efficiency as a whole. To become proactive in sustainable ways of working, cooperating with experienced Facility Management providers that can advise on how sustainability pays off in the workplace strategy and how sustainable practices should be executed will be important.

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Service Futures represents the most important visions, trends and insights for the future of service, facility management, the workplace as an experience, HRM and outsourcing.

Across all our topics, we have one single goal; to enrich our readers with ideas and thoughts that help them become more courageous and creative in their work now and in the future. We do this based on thorough industry research, theory, practice and by engaging the foremost experts to express their visions and thoughts in the most influential way possible.